Lovely Exorcist Nanami
by Stealth Noodle
Summary: Nanami receives the mysterious power to protect Ohtori from ghosts. ...Or something like that.


**Title**: Lovely Exorcist Nanami  
**Rating**: SFW  
**Wordcount**: 3632  
**Summary**: Nanami receives the mysterious power to protect Ohtori from ghosts. ...Or something like that.

**Note**: Written for **kalloway** for **parallelsfic **on Dreamwidth.

* * *

You just couldn't trust the help with something as temptingly personal as the mail, so Nanami had taken it upon herself to collect all incoming letters and packages, sort them, and add anything that was addressed to Touga and wasn't from a girl to a neat stack on his desk, to be opened when he was finally himself again. Anything sealed with a lipstick kiss, stinking of perfume, or signed with hearts went into the incinerator. Keeping the swarming insects away from her brother required tireless vigilance.

Today the only delivery was a box wrapped in plain brown paper, with no markings but "TO NANAMI" in large, crude hiragana. Judging by the size and weight, it was probably a party dress with an array of accessories. Certainly nothing she'd ordered; she had everything shipped directly to her personal tailor.

A gift, then. Nanami bit her lip and considered everyone who knew her measurements. Perhaps it was from Keiko; though the details eluded her, she was certain that Keiko had something quite serious to apologize for.

After a little more dithering, Nanami shook the box, heard nothing particularly revelatory, and headed to her room. If it turned out to be something hideous, she certainly didn't want anyone to see her handling it.

It turned out to be colorful, mostly. Frilly. A white leotard with cascading layers of skirts of pink and purple and yellow, along with coordinating knee-high boots. Underneath Nanami found an embarrassment of accessories: a tiara with some sort of black veil attached, long white gloves draped with rosaries, and an enormous pink brooch shaped like a crucifix. Along the side of the box lay what looked like a shakujou shrunk down to the size of a magic wand, its rings shaped like hearts.

"Is this a joke?" Nanami demanded of the packaging, which didn't cough up so much as a note. She tore meticulously through the tissue paper and dismantled the box before accepting that someone really had dared to send her something so ridiculous without even owning up to it.

And it _was_ ridiculous. It looked like an outfit out of some third-rate shoujo manga, the sort of thing she'd read obsessively in elementary school but was far too mature for now. She'd outgrown magical girl stories as surely as she'd outgrown her old school uniforms. She was much too old now to daydream about transforming into a beautiful avatar of justice who could banish the unworthy and then swoon gracefully into her arms of her devoted brother.

The leotard fit perfectly.

Nanami spun around a few times in front of her mirror, skirts and veil fluttering out around her, beads and rings jangling, before pressing the back of her hand to her chin and laughing. Pointing the wand at her reflection, she narrowed her eyes. It would have been so satisfying, when she dueled Utena, to have transformed, blasted the stupid rose from Utena's stupid chest, and then, overcome by elation and exertion, collapsed as Touga defended her from Utena's unfair retaliation. Surely, if anything could draw him out of his lingering darkness, it would be the need to rush heroically to her aid.

She'd moved on to composing theme music for her own anime adaptation when a dreadful thump came from the hallway.

"Big Brother?" she called uncertainly through her door. "Is that you?"

Another thump. Heart galloping in her chest, Nanami cracked open her door and squinted into the darkness of the hall. Why weren't the lights on? How long had the lights not been on?

Again she called, "Big Brother?" and again there was no response. "This—this isn't funny!" she shouted, knuckles going white around the magic wand. "Whoever you are, apologize immediately!"

Just down the hallway, where the faint lingering twilight crept in through the window, one of the curtains rose and fluttered on its own, accompanied by an eerie squeaking. Nanami shrieked and ducked back into her room, howling for Touga. He didn't respond. Perhaps the ghost had already gotten to him.

The wand's rings clanked together in time with Nanami's trembling. She caught her breath and held it for a moment. Crucifix, shakujou, rosaries—perhaps, just perhaps—

Still shaking, pulse pounding in her ears, she crept out into the hallway, planted her feet, and leveled the wand at the curtain. "Begone, ghost!" she cried.

The curtain fell back into place. The squeaking diminished to a low whine of "_chuuuuu_" before fading away altogether. Dumbfounded with relief, Nanami slumped back against the wall.

Touga's door eased ajar. He looked at her blankly, reached out to flick the light switch on, and closed the door again. He was still sullen and withdrawn, but unharmed.

Nanami glanced between the wand, the curtain, and Touga's door. There was no doubt about it; her fingertips flew to her mouth as she gasped. "I really _am_ a magical girl!"

* * *

"I'm not sure about this, Nanami-san," said Tsuwabuki.

"_Be_ sure," she replied sharply. "I am!" The rings on her wand clattered as she shook it at him.

He could hear Mari now, mocking him for believing in childish fantasies, but how childish could it be if it was Nanami's idea? And if he was lucky, this would be the kind of thing that ended with her turning into a cow again; this time, he was prepared. He nodded and held out his arms.

* * *

Saionji's quiet, solitary practice was disrupted by the sound of the door to the kendo hall being thrown open. Nanami strutted in like a girl on a mission, followed by that elementary-schooler who had become her shadow, lugging a suspicious bag. As he finished another kata, she called, "Good morning! Wouldn't you say the kendo hall feels terribly haunted today?"

There were times when Saionji wondered what his life would be like if the Kiryuu family had never happened to it. "I wouldn't," he said flatly.

"You haven't heard any strange sounds?" She sashayed across the floor, eyebrows raised, hand cupped to her ear. "Seen anything peculiar?" Her hand moved to shade her squinting eyes. "Felt the icy touch of an unearthly presence?"

Saionji backed out of reach of her hand. "There's been nothing of the sort."

"Oh, really?" She rested her chin against the back of her hand. "Then how do you explain..."

He gave her five seconds' polite silence before asking, "Explain what?"

"Well, be patient!" She crossed her arms, cheeks a flustered shade of pink. "I don't control the ghosts, I just exorcise them!"

It was probably better not to ask. Saionji raised his shinai and resumed his kata.

Seconds later, something rattled loudly in the protective gear closet.

"Aha!" Nanami jolted into a heroic pose. "Don't be afraid, Kyouichi! Ghosts are no match for—" She glanced around in apparent consternation, then took off at a run for the locker room, snapping her fingers. The elementary-schooler hurried after her, bag bouncing against his back.

"That wasn't happening before!" Saionji yelled after them, to no response.

The closet continued to rattle. Mice had gotten loose in the fencing hall not too long ago; if the kendo hall now suffered the same fate, Juri would be sure to reciprocate all of Saionji's needling over the issue. What did one do about mice, anyway? Was it better to go after them now, or leave the closet sealed until traps were set?

Saionji was still debating when Nanami returned from the the locker room in an outfit that made him choke. She'd always seemed more inclined to ball gowns than cosplay, but this, even to his untrained eye, was decidedly not formal wear. "What?" he asked, because he couldn't form a more detailed question.

Her boot heels clacked against the wooden floor as she dashed to the closet. "Don't be afraid," she said again, skidding to a jangling halt. "Ghosts are no match for Lovely Exorcist Nanami!" She snapped her fingers, and the elementary-schooler handed her some kind of ridiculous plastic stick, which she shook furiously at the noisy closet.

"I hardly think," Saionji began, just before the closet let out an eerie whine and fell still.

Nanami turned with a smug smile, chin raised and arms folded. "The forces of darkness cannot stand against a maiden's pure heart! Come, Tsuwabuki!" In a blaze of color and noise, she and her minion sprinted for the locker room again.

Scowling, Saionji rested his shinai over his shoulder and approached the closet. It remained silent. Annoyed at the quickening of his own heartbeat, he opened the door and found nothing but practice armor in a state of moderate disarray. Poking at the mess produced neither mice nor mysteries, though it did turn up the dusty breastplate that Touga used to favor. It had been quite some time since Touga came to spar.

Saionji had gotten half a shelf back in order when Nanami emerged from the locker room in her student council uniform and made a beeline for the exit. He cleared his throat and said, "You should help clean this up."

"No time!" she replied on her way out. "I'm surely needed elsewhere!" The elementary schooler pulled the door shut behind them.

With a grunt, Saionji returned to straightening up the contents of the closet. Someday, he'd have to learn to stop expecting anything from a Kiryuu.

* * *

Miki waited to start his stopwatch until he had said, "The piano just needs to be tuned, Nanami-san."

"It needs to have the ghosts tuned out, you mean." She paced back and forth in front of the piano like a health inspector in a filthy restaurant, nose wrinkled and hands tucked behind her back. "Imagine how it plays itself at night when there's no one in the music room. How creepy!"

Eleven-point-twenty-eight seconds. "I've been here at night," Miki replied. "It's never done anything like that."

She scowled at him. "I _said_ when no one's around!"

"What about the violins, Nanami-san?" Tsuwabuki asked from the other end of the music room.

"It's the piano that's haunted," she insisted. After a pause that the stopwatch clocked at two-point-six seconds, she added, "But I've never trusted violins," and walked over to him.

Miki winced. "Please be careful, Nanami-kun. That's a Stradivarius."

To his mingled relief and alarm, she lost all interest in the violins when an inexplicable blast came from one of the trombones. They were alone in the room; there was no space for someone to hide behind the brass section.

"Don't be afraid! I'll be right back!" Nanami shouted on her way out the door, Tsuwabuki in tow.

The trombone continued to play itself, roving clumsily along the chromatic scale. Frowning, Miki timed each note: half a second, two-tenths of a second, three seconds even, seven-eights of a second... No pattern emerged. When the longest note ended, a banana peel flew out of the bell and slid along the polished floor.

With a cry of "Lovely Exorcist Nanami is on the scene," Nanami burst back into the room, wearing an outfit that defied Miki's fashion vocabulary. It looked like something from one of the cartoons Kozue used to stay home and watch when she stopped playing piano.

Miki bit his lip and moved out of her way. "Watch out for—" he began, a little too late. She was fortunate that Tsuwabuki was so quick to break her fall with his body.

"That didn't count!" she wailed as Miki helped her up. "I'm going to redo my entrance, so you'd better look awed again!"

The trombone played three descending notes.

* * *

"No," said Juri.

Nanami's lower lip jutted out. "But with so much elegant antique jewelry, you must own something haunted! What about that locket you always—"

Juri slammed the door.

* * *

They stopped for lunch under the largest shade tree on campus. As Tsuwabuki set out the lunch he'd prepared for her that morning (fried chicken, asparagus, and rice with a pickled plum), Nanami waved over her three trusted lieutenants, explained that she had important matters to attend now that put even her role in the student council to shame, and sent them off on a mission to punish a girl who had shamelessly copied Nanami's hairstyle.

It truly was magnificent to see her at work as the elegant shadow queen of Ohtori.

"I'm sorry I was skeptical, Nanami-san," he said as she started on her chicken.

She shrugged and swallowed. "Well, you shouldn't believe just anything anyone tells you. But you should always believe everything I tell you. All right?"

"Yes, ma'am!"

A long shadow intruded on the moment, which Tsuwabuki traced up to the looming figure of Tenjou Utena. "There you are," she said. "Micky said you were acting weird."

Nanami sniffed. "There's nothing weird about defending Ohtori Academy from the restless dead!"

"From the restless... oh, brother." Utena eyed Tsuwabuki's bag suspiciously. "Did you get another funny present in the mail?"

"No! Well, yes, but this is nothing like _the incident we do not speak of_." With a meaningful jab of her chopsticks, Nanami added, "You're not the only one around here with special powers anymore!"

Tsuwabuki nodded. "Nanami-san's incredible! Ohtori is already much less haunted than it was this morning."

Utena cocked her head. "I've never seen any ghosts around."

"That's because a commoner like you has no spiritual sensitivity." With a curved knife of a smile, Nanami added, "Why, that creepy old dorm of yours must be extremely haunted. Of course, with my busy schedule, I have no idea when I'll find the time to purify it."

"It's not haunted," Utena replied flatly. "All the weird noises are just Himemiya's pets."

"Or pet _ghosts_."

Utena threw her hands up. "Fine, do whatever you want! Just be careful this time, okay?"

As she headed away, Nanami smiled smugly and popped her plum into her mouth. It was a classy, grown-up maneuver that Tsuwabuki had been practicing at night for weeks, but the sourness still made his cheeks pinch and his eyes water. Someday, he vowed. Then onward to black coffee.

"Tsuwabuki," Nanami said, "have you ever heard the expression 'with great power comes great responsibility'?"

It sounded like something she might have read for class. "Yes," he bluffed.

"Well, I've been thinking." She leaned back, arms folded under her head, and stared up at the patches of sky that filtered through the leaves. "Is chasing ghosts out of club rooms really the point of a magnificent power like mine? Since I have power over the dead, then surely I—" her voice hooked, and dragged the sentence with it— "I looked everywhere inside the house, but I still don't know what's haunting my big brother."

Tsuwabuki, who had not enjoyed the previous evening spent roving the too-large, too-dark, too-empty Kiryuu residence for spooks that never materialized, did not suggest trying again. "Do you think Saionji-senpai might have any ideas?"

Nanami scowled. "It's no good asking anyone for help! No one knows more about Big Brother than I do. If I don't know..." Her lip curled into a pout, and the crease in her forehead deepened as she glared at the sky as if it had personally offended her.

Abruptly she sat up and announced, "I've got it! Tsuwabuki, come here so I can blindfold you."

"W-wait!" He scooted backward, away from the strip of fabric she'd pulled from her pocket. "_Why_?"

"Because we're going somewhere you're not allowed to go." She tapped her foot and snapped her fingers. "Now stop being difficult."

"Can't I just promise not to tell anyone?"

She curled the fabric around her fingers, looking thoughtful. "As acting Student Council President," she decided at length, "I'll grant a special dispensation. Now come along!"

Tsuwabuki wiped his forehead, hoisted his bag on his back, and took off after her. Nanami could move at a surprisingly good clip when she wanted to.

She led him past classrooms and club buildings to the edge of campus, where tall stairs led into the forest. A narrow bridge terminated in a decorative wall that blocked deeper access. "But there's nothing here, Nanami-san," he said, just before she raised the hand with her ring and made the rest of the day's events seem mundane.

"Come along," she said, and they passed together through the impossible gate. Beyond lay a staircase that made Tsuwabuki's legs ache just looking at it, so of course that was the direction in which Nanami nonchalantly led him.

Something about all of this tickled the back of his brain. He'd never been here before, of course—the forest was off-limits through any entrance—but his feet knew where to go, and every flicker of surprise faded immediately. Perhaps he'd dreamt of coming here at Nanami's side. A whiff of roses left him suddenly and darkly nostalgic.

Panting hard, he ascended the last of the steps and plopped down on the enormous dais that topped them. He'd climbed up through _clouds_. That seemed a little weird, and that it seemed only a little weird was probably the weirdest part of all.

"Look at it," said Nanami. He raised his head and followed the trajectory of her finger to what looked like a castle hovering upside-down in the sky. Tsuwabuki found himself fresh out of shock; his reaction failed to rise above the level of polite interest.

"It can't be real," she continued. "Maybe it's some kind of ghost kingdom. Ghosts have to go somewhere when they're not haunting other people's houses, right? Anyway, whatever's haunting my big brother, it must be hiding up there."

The castle spun slowly, as if it dangled from a thread. "It's pretty big, isn't it?" Tsuwabuki said. "And very far away."

Nanami tossed her hair like a mane as she turned to face him, eyes burning with determination. "Well, it's no match for Lovely Exorcist Nanami! Quick, give me my..."

Tsuwabuki had opened his bag before he caught the meaning of her trailing off. There was nothing like a changing room up here.

This time he failed to talk his way out of the blindfold.

After several minutes of jingling, he felt her fingers untie the knot at the back of his head. "As I was saying," Nanami said, shaking her wand at the castle, "my pure maiden's heart is unstoppable! My love for my brother conquers time and space!"

There should have been beams of light after an impassioned statement like that. Dramatic music. Pealing bells. Ghosts streaming down in waves of white robes and black hair, to be vaporized mid-stream by the force of Nanami's devotion.

Instead there was only jingling, furious at first, then weaker and weaker.

"It's... too powerful..." Nanami staggered backward and sank to her knees, her wand arm trembling. "I can't... Big Brother..." With a breathless wail, she collapsed on her side.

For once, Touga didn't appear out of nowhere to punch a kangaroo and ruin everything. Tsuwabuki knelt beside her and managed to almost-lift her onto his back. As he dragged her toward the spiraling stairs, she mumbled, "Mmm, Big Brother..."

"Don't be afraid, Nanami-san," he said, in the deeper voice he'd been practicing for weeks. "I'll protect you."

She held on to him, and Tsuwabuki began mentally composing his diary entry for the greatest day of his life.

* * *

The bag jangled every time Nanami nudged it with her foot. It didn't matter if she got it dirty; it was bound for the incinerator, and she wouldn't tolerate any whining from Tsuwabuki about that later. He'd dragged her down ten thousand steps like a sack of potatoes and scuffed up her costume to the point that parts of it might still be mistaken for a potato sack. He was lucky she wasn't going to put him down the incinerator after it.

"So I'm going to get rid of it," she told the silence on the other side of Touga's door. "What's the point, if I can't use it to make my most precious person smile?" She rested more of her weight against the wall and picked at her fingernails. "I don't care about ghosts. I only care about you."

And he wasn't a ghost, the Touga who looked at her without contempt or indifference. All she had to do was burn away the rest of the world, and he'd be there, smiling, among the ashes.

The silence persisted. Nanami pressed her ear to the door. Through the wood, she could faintly make out her brother's recording, over and over: "If we don't crack the world's shell, we will die without being born."

With a sharp breath, she straightened up. "That's it! The _eggs_. The eggs are haunted! All this time, we've had wicked ghosts hiding in our own refrigerator!"

The recording scratched to a halt.

* * *

In the middle of her evening calf stretches, Utena heard an inquisitive "Chu?" from the windowsill behind her. She turned and bent down with a grin. "Oh, there you are, Chu-Chu! I haven't seen you all day."

He squeaked at her before running up her arm and rummaging in her jacket pocket for treats.

"Welcome home!" Anthy called from the table. "The tea's ready."

Utena caught the candy wrapper Chu-Chu ejected from her pocket before settling in opposite Anthy. "Tea sounds great! It's been a long day." With her cup at her lips, she paused, frowned, and said, "Hey, Nanami was acting weird again today, and she said she got another package in the mail."

Anthy smiled vacantly for a while before replying, "Ah, the mail carrier might have made another mistake."

"I didn't see anything for a cow this time, though."

"Oh, I haven't ordered anything for her lately, but Nanami is also what I call my cosplay collection."

Utena lowered her cup with a heavy sigh. "Oy, Himemiya..."

"It's a lovely name, isn't it?" Anthy said, and sipped her tea.


End file.
